iWeb and Internet Exporer Alert!

This summer I redid my school’s website in iWeb. Everything went great, and the site never looked better (at least I think so).

I thought all was well until I got an email this morning that the site was causing Internet Explorer for Windows to crash. Imagine that! A site actually caused problems on a PC and not a Mac.

Since most of the people who visit the school site use Windows, this could be a major problem.

The site worked fine in Firefox for Windows, so the first step was to let families know they could download and install Firefox as an alternative. However, there are nonschool families that go to the site, so this would not be a full solution.

The next step was to go to Apple’s Discussion boards. It turns out this is a common problem with an easy solution.

Internet Explorer does not like .png files, which iWeb creates when uploading a site. From reading the posts on Apple’s site I learned that IE really hates overlapping graphics and text. This can be fixed in some cases by shrinking text boxes, and avoiding overlap. For me this was not the problem.

The most common cause of the crashing turns out to be horizontal and vertical lines the you can insert into a page. I had two vertical lines on the school’s homepage. I deleted them, and the site worked fine in Internet Explorer.

Of course, these lines can be an important graphic element on a website. My solution? Create graphics in photoshop of these lines and use them in place of the lines you can insert in iWeb. I haven’t tried it yet, but I will tonight and post the results in this blog. My educated guess says they should work.

If your website is causing IE crashes, try the solutions I mentioned above. I’d start with deleting those lines.

One other note: I did install Beta 3 of IE7 on the windows computer I was testing the site on. That also solved the crashing problem, but IE7 caused problems on the computer itself.

Update: Using to vertical lines in the form of GIF files works fine.